Thursday, April 26, 2012

Love is the Key: making lifestyle changes that stick

The American Cancer Society now says the evidence has piled up that diet and exercise can help cancer survivors manage, beat, and stay free of their disease, too. However, too few people have the discipline to follow their well-known advice.

For many people, willpower is the core issue in following a healthier diet, getting more exercise, and losing weight. The key to finding willpower, which no doctor can offer, is LOVE - an overriding and deep caring about yourself, your family, and others!

For me, everything important comes together in one compassionate lifestyle - going vegan! Caring for the plight of animals, human well-being, and the environment brings the elements of LOVE & DEDICATION to my 'diet' that makes healthy eating an absolute imperative - and much more enjoyable than junk food can ever be!

The vegan lifestyle uses compassion as the glue - to bind together health, longevity, sustainability, environmentalism, community-building, spirituality, and activism.

You're only going succeed in making lifestyle changes if you care. Open your heart to a wider and deeper love for yourself and others - then you will care enough to heal yourself and earn more quality lifetime to spend with your family & friends!

Be well, peas & carrots ;)

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Is Whole Foods seafood department really Sustainable?

Here's my response to Whole Foods' "Earth Day" announcement that it's removing 12 threatened species of fish from its seafood department:

To me, “sustainable” means something that everyone could do for an indefinite period of time without causing a collapse of one kind or another. Since “everyone” means 7 billion people, eating fish at all is not sustainable.
If we each take just one fish, there went 7 billion fish. NOT sustainable, period.
Ocean fish stocks are in total collapse from overfishing and a lack of international protective treaties. Fish farms are even worse – destroying the wild habitat, consuming massive amounts of feed and producing massive amounts of pollution.

Fish are intelligent wild animals who feel pain, can suffer, and belong to social groups. Fish are also a critical part of the ecosystem’s balance with millions of years of marine evolution balancing them between their predators and their food sources. When you take a fish from the ocean, you take it from another species who depends on it.
Choose compassion, choose sustainability – don’t eat wild fish or farmed fish.
If you feel you must have fish, grow your own in an aquaculture and recycle the waste water (in symbiosis with your garden).

DHA/Omega-3 amino acids are often used as an excuse to kill fish; however these nutrients are available from algae sources (where the fish got them).

One grocery chain sparing only a few of the most threatened species does nothing to help them recover. This just shifts the threat onto the next species of fish. This is just pure CYA brand management. Whole Foods doesn’t care about fish – they just don’t want to be “on the hook” when these fish are declared commercially extinct (in like 2015).

I do respect that Whole Foods is stopping the very worst of its profiteering from the killing of threatened fish species – but...
In order to truly own up to the damage you’ve done – you need to get out there and restore fish stocks! Not just stop killing ;)
 Thanks and Happy Earth Day ;)